Put Humanity Before War in Iran

The United States and Israel’s regime change justification for attacking Iran is a contrivance. Why are some Iranians happy about the death of Ayatollah Khamenei?

VIOLENCE, in any name, can never be justified. The attacks by the United States and Israel on Iran that have killed more than 1,000 people, including hundreds of children, even must be condemned. Humanity must not be discarded for political or economic ambition, or the madness of aggressors.

We sympathize with the Iranian people who have fallen victim to this war, just as we care for those repressed by the country’s own government. The situation there is far from black and white. Thus, while many residents sob and mourn the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, others find themselves celebrating.

To understand what is happening there, we cannot look at only the latest episode. We must look back at the prequel. Through the eyes of filmmaker Jafar Panahi, we can at least begin to grasp what has transpired in Iran in recent years.

The director of the film It Was Just an Accident was sentenced to one year in prison in absentia in December 2025 on charges of producing propaganda against the state. This was not his first punishment. Time and again, he has been imprisoned and banned from filmmaking because his works raise humanitarian issues and criticize the regime. The government felt the sting.

As a result, his films were banned from being screened in Iran. He made his cinema in secret, with a makeshift cast and crew, then smuggled the footage abroad for screening. When he was sentenced last December, he was outside the country promoting It Was Just an Accident—an Oscar-nominated film that explores the inner conflict of victims of the Iranian regime’s torture.

When news of Khamenei’s death broke, Panahi’s heart was in turmoil. He felt a sense of joy, for the man most responsible for the death and suffering of a portion of the Iranian people was gone. But he also felt a deep sorrow. “We never had the chance to bring him to justice.”

In January 2026, while suppressing mass demonstrations over the worsening economy, the Iranian authority killed thousands of demonstrators and detained thousands more. And when it tried to break up protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman beaten by the morality police in 2022 after being accused of not wearing her hijab (headscarf) properly, the regime also killed and detained many protestors. And there were similar incidents before these.

After overthrowing Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979, the new government, led by Khomeini and then by Khamenei, was an oppressive one. The theocratic regime has consistently silenced critical voices, women’s rights, and Kurdish ethnic minorities. Iran is one of the countries that most frequently executes political prisoners.

However, civil liberties fared no better under Shah Reza Pahlavi. Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Shah led a secular Iran, but his secret service, SAVAK, was no less brutal than today’s apparatus. Terror was constant. SAVAK kidnapped and murdered those who dared oppose the Shah.

The United States, which helped the Shah topple Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, cannot wash its hands of SAVAK’s atrocities. It was the US that trained SAVAK and served as the Shah’s protector for decades.

When Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu claim to attack Iran to liberate its people from tyranny, they are using a manufactured pretext. It is impossible for the United States or Israel to act without prioritizing their own strategic interests.

The strike that killed Khamenei came in the same “package” as attacks on schools and hospitals. While boasting of Khamenei’s death, Washington and Tel Aviv ignore the children who lost their lives to their missiles. Here lies the naked hypocrisy of this war.

Jafar Panahi once again provides a way for us to understand the turmoil in the hearts of Iranians. Currently in New York, he refuses to be a hypocrite. If he wished, he could remain in America and avoid his prison sentence. Instead, he intends to return to his homeland—and accept his punishment—because he refuses to be seen siding with the US.

We should all side with humanity—not with regimes or aggressors who are equally hypocritical and haunted by their own fears.

Read the Complete Story in Tempo English Magazine

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